KC says disco music getting another day in the Sunshine

If there's one thing Harry Wayne Casey wants you to know, it's that disco doesn't suck.

Casey — that's KC of KC and The Sunshine Band — says that despite the way the dance-music genre was vilified after its 1970s heyday, disco is undergoing a huge comeback.

It's just not called disco anymore.

Casey says he hears disco in obvious club genres such as electronic dance music, but in reality "it's everywhere."

"You have Lady Gaga, you have Flo Rida, you have Pitbull, you have Usher, you have … ," Casey says, dissolving into laughter in a recent phone call. "Yeah, you have everybody, every genre. Even country music sounds danceable. So it is, like, from rock to country to everything."

Casey, who helped create the disco genre when he made R&B-horns songs groovy and danceable starting with 1975's "Get Down Tonight," certainly is benefiting from that resurgence.

He and his dozen-member Sunshine Band are now on tour celebrating 40 years together, and on Aug. 8 headline Musikfest's main Steel Stage. Casey says he's also working on what will be his first album of new music in more than a dozen years, set for release next spring.

The band's Top 40 hit "Boogie Shoes" was recently one of 25 recordings from 2012 chosen as part of the "Saturday Night Fever" soundtrack for induction into the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress. Those chosen are considered "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant."

Casey isn't shy about what he sees as his role in disco. He says it is "something that I created and had a lot to do with initiating this sound."

"It started out as R&B music, and this thing that we created or were creating became disco music or dance music or whatever they … decide to change the name to, depending on the year," he says with a laugh.

He says "Get Down Tonight" started as a song called "What You Want is What You'll Get."

"And I just started thinking about the club scene that was happening and stuff — kind of the things that when you go to a club. You know, you 'do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight.' With that, he added, the dance groove and a genre was born.

"Get Down Tonight" went to No. 1 in 1975 — months before The Bee Gees' debut dance-music hit "Jive Talkin'" also topped the charts. KC and the Sunshine Band's eponymous sophomore album that included "Get Down Tonight" went triple platinum and topped the R&B chart.

The group followed that with another No. 1, "That's the Way (I Like It)," and in the next four years sold 8 million copies of its four albums and had seven more Top 10 hits, including three more — "(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty," "I'm Your Boogie Man" and "Keep It Coming Love" — that hit No. 1.

But Casey also says that, as perhaps the most successful disco artist besides The Bee Gees, his band also bore the brunt of backlash against the genre that included such events as the 1979 Disco Demolition Night, at which disco records were blown up in Chicago's Comiskey Park.

"How do I say this?" Casey says. "Critics and the press, in a way, have tried to convince me, as they've done a pretty good job of almost convincing the nation, that disco was bad. Even to the point where the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame doesn't even honor that 10-year period of music. They totally ignore it."

By 1979, Casey was starting to broaden his musical style, and had two chart-toppers with slower songs that were far less dance-oriented: "Please Don't Go" — the first No. 1 single of the 1980s — and "Yes I'm Ready," a cover of Philadelphia soul singer Barbara Mason's 1965 hit, sung as a duet with singer-songwriter Teri DeSario.

Casey says he was recording the platinum 1979 album "Do You Wanna Go Party" and was between songs when he started playing the chords to "Please Don't Go" and decided to record it "as kind of an attempt to dispel the 'Well all he can do is the shake, shake, shake your booty and that's the way I like it-type of songs."

"It was just meant to change it up a little bit, and to show there was a little bit more depth to me … there was a lot of depth to me."

But that album was Casey's last to chart as disco quickly fell out of favor. A 1982 album "All in A Night's Work" failed to chart, but one of its songs, "Give It Up," became a surprise hit in Europe. Still, fearing the disco backlash, Epic Records refused to release it as a single, Casey says.

That led him to leaving the label, negotiating the rights to the song and starting his own Meca Records. It took nearly two years to release, but "Give It Up" became Casey's last hit, and arguably disco music's, as well.

Casey says the ordeal soured him to the point where, "I just quit," he says. "I didn't want anything to do with any of it anymore. Burned out, tired of it, tired of the politics, tired of the B.S. that went along with a lot of it."